The Epic Fight Between Wired and Glenn Greenwald

After weeks of Twitter-baiting and pent-up anger, two editors at Wired.com are finally expressing
their utter disgust for Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald. At issue is
Greenwald's criticism of Wired's WikiLeaks coverage. Greenwald demands
that Wired publish the transcripts it obtained between alleged leaker Bradley
Manning and Adrian Lamo, the 29-year-old hacker who turned Manning in to
the FBI. In the transcript, Manning reportedly confesses to Lamo that he
leaked the classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks.

Wired has published some
of the transcripts--but not enough to satisfy Greenwald, who has been
drumming up a number of theories as to why Wired hasn't been fully
"transparent." One explanation, Greenwald posits, is an inappropriate
closeness between Lamo and Wired senior editor Kevin Poulsen. Poulsen,
Greenwald explains, has interviewed Lamo and written about his reputation as a hacker since long before the WikiLeaks affair came about. Is Poulsen protecting Lamo in exchange for access?

Wired
editors Poulsen and Evan Hansen categorically deny Greenwald's
allegations. They explain that they've withheld some of the transcripts
because they contain embarrassing and/or damaging information about the
subjects, and don't add anything of substance to the story.
Additionally, they list a "litany of errors" published by Greenwald and
attack his professional integrity. They call his work a "breathtaking
mix of sophistry, hypocrisy and journalistic laziness." This morning,
Greenwald responded to Poulsen and Hansen's post, promising to "address each and every one of their accusations in order."

Here are their main bones of contention:

On Publishing the Transcripts Hansen defends Wired's decision:

To be sure, there’s a legitimate argument to be made for publishing
Manning’s chats. The key question (to us): At what point does everything
Manning disclosed in confidence become fair game for reporting, no
matter how unconnected to his leaking or the court-martial proceeding
against him, and regardless of the harm he will suffer? That’s a debate
we have had internally at Wired with every major development in the
case.

It
is not a question, however, that we’re inclined to put to popular
referendum. And while we welcome the honest views of other journalists
acting in good faith, we now doubt this describes Glenn Greenwald.

Greenwald doesn't buy that excuse, however, and explains why he wants the transcripts published:

For anyone who wants to defend Wired here, I'd really like to know:
what possible excuse is there for their refusal to do this? Even if
you trust Poulsen -- despite his very close and long relationship to
Lamo -- to conceal some parts of the chats on privacy grounds, what
justification is there for Wired's refusal to state that either (a)
Lamo's claims about what Manning told him are supported by the chat logs
(and then publish those portions), or (b) Lamo's claims are not
found in the chat logs, thus proving that Lamo is either lying or has an
unreliable recollection? While Adrian Lamo runs around spouting all
sorts of serious accusations about what Manning supposedly told him that
are not found in Wired's excerpts -- claims which end up in the world's
largest news outlets -- and while he issues one contradictory claim
after the next about these events, how can anyone claiming to be a
journalist not inform the public about whether those stories are true? For Wired defenders: what justifies that obfuscatory behavior, that refusal to say whether Lamo's claims are true or false based on the chat logs?

...Wired
is hiding the key evidence about what took place here, thus allowing
Lamo to spout all sorts of serious claims without any check and thus
drive much of the reporting about WikiLeaks.

On Poulsen's Relationship to Lamo Poulsen attacks Greenwald's depiction of their relationship:

Last June ... [Greenwald] ... claimed that
Lamo and I have “long and strange history together.” That “history”
began in 2000, when, while reporting for the computer security news site
SecurityFocus.com, I contacted Lamo to use him as an expert on security issues at AOL. ... In the intrusion
that finally resulted in his arrest, he cracked The New York Times
intranet and added himself to the paper’s internal database of op-ed
contributors ... To
Greenwald, all this makes Lamo “a low-level, inconsequential hacker.”
... Greenwald’s theory is that
Lamo’s hacks were not newsworthy. But, this line of thought goes, in
exchange for the chance to break the non-news of his intrusions, I
reported them — getting Lamo attention ... What he fails to report is
that those same breaches were also covered by the Associated Press,
Reuters, Wired
magazine (well before my tenure at Wired.com), cable news networks,
every tech news outlet and several national newspapers, and that Lamo
spoke freely to all of them.

So when
he writes that I had “exclusive, inside information from Lamo,” he is
wrong. And when he writes that Lamo had an “insatiable need for
self-promotion and media attention, and for the past decade, it has been
Poulsen who satisfies that need,” he’s ignoring the fact that my
reporting for an obscure computer security news site constituted an
almost inconceivably tiny portion of the coverage generated by Lamo’s
hacks.

Responding to Poulsen, Greenwald continues to insist that his relationship with Lamo was inappropriate

I detailed with multiple links and documentation in my June article
exactly what makes this Lamo-Poulsen relationship so strange. Lamo
basically used Poulsen as his personal spokesman for years: he'd hack,
and then have Poulsen announce it. When Lamo was involuntarily
hospitalized, it was Poulsen he called, so that Wired would write about in the light Lamo wanted.

On Greenwald's Journalistic Integrity
On Christmas day, Greenwald reached out to Poulsen for comment and
published a story soon afterward—not giving Poulsen enough time to
respond, says Hansen:

When we
didn’t meet the urgent Yuletide deadline he’d imposed on himself to
publish a piece about a 10-day-old newspaper article, he wrote in his
column that we “ignored the inquiries,” adding: “This is not the
behavior of a journalist seeking to inform the public, but of someone
eager, for whatever reasons, to hide the truth.”

Greenwald defends his "Yuletide deadline":

I...
emailed Poulsen on Saturday morning -- Christmas -- and told him I
intended to write about this the following day. When I didn't hear back
from him all day Saturday, I waited the entire next day (Sunday) and,
in the hopes of getting a reply from Poulsen, still didn't write
anything. I only published my piece mid-morning on Monday: two full
days after I first emailed Poulsen. Once it was published, Poulsen,
despite being "on vacation," certainly responded on Twitter very
quickly.

On Greenwald's Omission of Important Facts
Poulsen takes Greenwald to task for not explaining that one of the
sources he uses to describe Lamo is a prominent WikiLeaks supporter:

Greenwald
descends into antics that shouldn’t pass muster at any serious news
outlet. He bolsters his argument by quoting Jacob Appelbaum as an expert
on Lamo. Appelbaum has "known Lamo for years," he writes, and "Lamo’s
‘only concern’ has always been ‘getting publicity for Adrian'."

Nowhere
in the article does he disclose that Appelbaum -- the only third-party
source in the piece -- is a key WikiLeaks activist: a man who’d shared
hotel rooms with Julian Assange, and had already spoken publicly on
behalf of the organization. Appelbaum's key role in the organization has
been a published fact since April.

Greenwald defends himself and (somewhat) concedes a point:

The quote from Appelbaum about Lamo's desire for publicity is (a)
something that at least ten other people told me in that period and (b)
completely ancillary to any points I raised about Wired. I will
readily concede that Appelbaum's association with WikiLeaks should have
been disclosed. It wasn't for a simple reason: I wasn't aware of it. ... I was unaware -- and still am
-- of any news reports before then identifying him as such. If there
were any, I didn't see them.

I quoted Appelbaum because his quote was most usable, but I could
easily have quoted at least ten other people with knowledge of Lamo to
make this same point. ... Wired's own Ryan Singel told me: "Lamo is clearly starved for attention. Often he gets it by coming up with odd leads. Here he decided to become a rat, and then went on to brag about it."
That quote would have sufficed just as well as the Appelbaum one.
That Lamo is pathologically fixated on self-promotion is an article of
faith in the hacker world.

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